Unruly Life of Woody Allen

by Marion Meade

  "Arthur was very much concerned about the irreverence vis-a-vis certain religions," recalled Eric Pleskow. (Certain scenes made fun of the United Jewish Appeal.) "Apart from being in the movie business, he had other dimensions, his activity in Democratic politics, and so he was always concerned with image. In the end, however, Bananas was well received and did us no harm."

  Once again, the critics took special notice of Woody. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby gave early evidence of loving anything Woody did because "when he is good, he is inspired. When he is bad, he's not rotten, he's just not so hot." Others, however, pointed to his still-crude filmmaking and took a dim view of his determination to be an auteur. By confusing the ability to write comedy with the ability to perform it, he ensured that Bananas would be dashed to bits on "the rocks of his acting and direction," wrote Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic. Kauffmann acknowledged in 1998 that he viewed Bananas as "on-the-job training. Woody was learning how to direct by making pictures. There wasn't a film student in the country who couldn't have better directed Bananas. He was a gifted writer whose acting was crude. His idea of acting was to wave his hands. Serious drama meant waving his hands more quickly." As for love scenes, Kauffmann could not appreciate Woody playing a lover. "Watching him kiss a girl—any girl—made me want to look the other way."

  Bananas was not a huge moneymaker but it would establish a blueprint for Woody's relationship with UA, who did not expect his films to earn much. In fact, as the years passed and film costs increased (and Woody spent more), his pictures would become even less profitable. "That wasn't the point," a former UA executive said impatiently. "He was our prestige item."

  Hollywood Vignettes:

  "Arthur was not a self-made man. He was a born prince."

  —Judy Feiffer, former Orion executive

  A special relationship soon developed between Woody and Arthur Krim. A bachelor most of his life, Krim finally married in his fifties. His wife, Mathilde, a physician who was one day to cofound the American Foundation for AIDS Research (AmFAR), had a daughter from a previous marriage. But Krim would never have children of his own. That fact, some people said, was the reason he showered Woody with what amounted to an adult version of a deluxe train set plus any other toy his heart desired. This plot, a scenario that L. B. Mayer would have approved, was pure Hollywood: Celebrated older man mentors brilliant younger man; ambitious protege repays his powerful benefactor with loyalty and prestige. According to the UA mythology, a "mystical glue" bound the two men together. It was very simple, said one executive: "Woody was the emotional son Arthur never had."

  In Woody's eyes, the cultured and magnetic Krim was a heroic personality. Unusual among entertainment moguls, he lived an entirely separate existence as a political activist. He had been a close personal friend and adviser of John F. Kennedy's. It was at Krim’s town house on East Sixty-ninth Street that President Kennedy, in 1962, celebrated after his forty-fifth birthday party in Madison Square Garden, when Marilyn Monroe crooned a sultry "Happy Birthday, Mr. President." Later the Democratic fund-raiser, who reportedly turned down cabinet posts and ambassadorships, would become an adviser to Presidents Johnson and Carter in the fields of civil rights, arms control, and Middle Eastern relations.

  This unusual man, and his UA colleagues, bestowed on Woody an extraordinary production deal with patronage that was unprecedented for a commercial artist. Basically, he could make any film he liked on any subject he liked. Woody, however, viewed the blank-check arrangement with restraint and vaguely presented it as "a nice, simple gentlemen's agreement." Once he tried to explain it to an editor at Cinema. There was no interference from his financial backers, he said. "I have absolute control. They don't have approval of the script. They don't have casting approval, they have absolutely nothing." Once in a great while "they"—Krim, or possibly Bob Benjamin or Eric Pleskow— would have something to say. "I always try and give them the courtesy of listening and talking with them. It never comes to anything. They always ask for permission just to come to the set." If he displayed condescension, it was not out of ignorance. He understood full well that the nice gentlemen's agreement, the money with no strings, was an amazing idea for Hollywood. "Had there been no Arthur Krim and UA, Woody's structure could not have evolved any other place in the world," believes Steven Bach, who was to join the studio in 1978 as senior vice president and head of worldwide production. Stanley Kauffmann calls his deal "sui generis, an independent filmmaker who never had to scrounge for money from a father-in-law, whose taproots are in the big money streams of Hollywood. There's been no one else in that position."

  The people at UA were well aware of their largess. "Sometimes I felt like the Medici," mused Pleskow, alluding to the princely Florentine family who patronized art and literature during the Renaissance. Granted, films such as Bananas and Sleeper did not really qualify as high culture, but this was Hollywood, and the idea of commissioning an independent filmmaker to develop whatever he fancied was exhilarating. By giving him his head, UA was likely to get a few duds along with very good pictures. Who could imagine what new ideas might flower? And, as Pleskow said with a smile, "we didn't poison anyone."

  "He knew how to handle us," explained Steven Bach. "He would ask for things, like the latest equipment in a private screening room, things that seemed a little outrageous. But we felt he deserved them. At the worst, you would take a tax deduction. At best, you would keep him happy." Of course Krim and Benjamin gave him "carte blanche," said another person. "He was their family."

  At the outset, the gentlemen's agreement did not seem at all extraordinary. He impressed the Medici, Pleskow recalled, "as an intelligent young man. No one could foresee that he'd do a film every year." But UA underestimated Woody.

  With two pictures under his belt, he was raring to do more. His second film for UA was loosely adapted from Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), a best-selling manual by sexologist Dr. David Reuben that supposedly answered patients' dumb questions. Acquiring the option from Paramount (who intended the vehicle for Elliot Gould), Woody never bothered to read the book. Glancing at Reuben's chapter headings, he structured an episodic script using seven questions ("What's a sex pervert?" "Do aphrodisiacs work?"). Then he proceeded to concoct the answers in a series of lunatic sketches that spoofed all sex manuals, Dr. Reuben’s in particular. In one sequence, "What is Sodomy?," an uptight doctor (Gene Wilder) enters into an obsessive affair with a sheep named Daisy, a devotee of frilly lingerie, and winds up in the gutter drinking Woolite. The final sketch, "What Happens During Ejaculation?," a clever parody of Fantastic Voyage, shows what happens in the male body during an orgasm. Woody, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, plays a neurotic sperm who worries about what will become of him. What if this turns out to be ordinary masturbation? What if he winds up on the ceiling?

  With the release of two hit films back to back, Woody was having a very good year. In May of 1972, the screen adaptation of Play It Again, Sam followed What's Up, Doc? into Radio City Music Hall. Critics split into two camps: the negative, who had been expecting another Marx brothers cartoon like Bananas, and the positive, who thought Woody's decision to broaden his appeal with a personal romantic comedy had paid off. Only four months later, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex opened to stinging notices and packed theaters. Soaring on word of mouth, it would become one of the top ten moneymakers of the year, despite the fact that notices universally panned it for tasteless material and too few laughs. At a Chicago screening, embarrassed critics even walked out, one of whom loudly sputtered "Yuck!" Woody's champion at the New York Times, Vincent Canby, deemed it clever but not particularly funny, and Dr. David Reuben was offended. (Eventually he endorsed its "humor, charm, and good taste, the best movie Woody Allen ever made.") None of this counted at the box office, however, where audiences found Woody's sex manual utterly irresistible.

  Moving Pictures:

  Luna: It's hard to believe you haven't had
sex for two hundred years.

  Miles: Two hundred and four if you count my marriage.

  —Sleeper, 1973

  In 1973 Miles Monroe, a former clarinet player with the Ragtime Rascals, is part-owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Store on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. One morning, he goes into St. Vincent's Hospital for what is supposed to be routine surgery on a peptic ulcer, but complications develop and he fails to regain consciousness. The doctors wrap him in aluminum foil and freeze him. Two hundred years later, society has retooled and the United States is a totalitarian state run by an albino fascist dictator. Rebel scientists trying to overthrow the government decide to revive Miles, the only person alive without an identification number. The bespectacled Miles, resembling a giant baked potato wrapped in tin foil, comes to in the year 2173. Expecting to wake up at St. Vincent's, he is naturally confused, more worried about his rent, now 2,400 months overdue, than about being a revolutionary hero. To avoid being captured by the thought police and reprogrammed, he disguises himself as a robot and winds up working for a socialite poet named Luna (Diane Keaton), whose work has been influenced by Rod McKuen. They join the underground movement and kidnap the Leader’s nose (all that is left after an assassination attempt) before he can be reconstructed by cloning.

  Again Woody used a collaborator, this time a thirty-one-year-old television producer named Marshall Brickman. Born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of a Polish Jew who came to the United States by way of Brazil, Brickman grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn and graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in music. In 1963 he met Woody at the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where Brickman was a banjo player with the Tarriers, folksingers managed by Rollins and Joffe, and Woody was performing stand-up. Brickman, who also played guitar and bass, later toured with John and Michelle Phillips before they joined the Mamas and the Papas, and finally switched to television comedy writing for Candid Camera and The Tonight Show, before producing The Dick Cavett Show. Although Brickman and Woody seemed to be opposite in temperament, with Brickman generally sociable and cheerful, they shared a similar comic sensibility. When someone once asked him to compare himself to Woody, he answered, "I'm taller."

  Unlike Woody's collaboration with Mickey Rose, in which they worked on a script together, Woody and Brickman worked out the plot to Sleeper during long walks, often through Central Park. Then Woody went home and wrote the draft, which Brickman would later read and comment upon. A talented craftsman, Brickman's strength was in understanding how to structure a story, an area in which Woody did less well.

  Sleeper was not their first attempt at collaboration. Several years earlier, there had been another script, but it failed to find a producer. This time there was no problem getting UA's approval and a budget of $2 million. With seven weeks allotted for filming, shooting began in Denver in the spring of 1973, and by summer had moved to Hollywood, to the old David O. Selznick lot in Culver City, where Gone With the Wind was filmed. Nestled amid the gigantic concrete buildings, Woody noticed a three-room cottage surrounded by a garden of daisies and a picket fence. Told that it had once been Clark Gable's dressing room bungalow, he promptly commandeered it for his office.

  Sleeper, a complicated picture requiring intricate sets and special effects, fell behind schedule, and additional photography soon depleted Woody's $350,000 fee. Under pressure to meet a Christmas release date, he frantically shot and edited simultaneously. Ralph Rosenblum, urgently summoned to Culver City in August, discovered that "tension pervaded every aspect" of the production. Nevertheless, Sleeper managed to open as scheduled on December 18 at Radio City Music Hall and received sensational reviews. It was Woody's first big critical and commercial success, one of the biggest moneymakers of the year. A delighted United Artists signed him to a new five-picture contract that extended his original deal to seven years.

  Not until Sleeper did Woody begin to attract generally respectful attention from large-circulation newspapers and magazines, some of whose critics now began to view him as the best comic director and actor in the country. Foremost among his admirers was Vincent Canby, the New York Times critic whom Woody would credit as one of the significant figures in his career. A reporter for Variety, Canby arrived at the Times in 1965 to cover show business and succeeded Renata Adler as film critic four years later. In the meantime, he had seen Woody perform stand-up at the Americana Hotel, where he made a point of talking to him "informally between shows one night. I had known little about him and I was knocked out." Take the Money and Run impressed him positively as "a night club routine but still a very good movie, and remains one of my favorites. Certainly I had a suspicion that he was up to something unusual." With Sleeper, Woody finally crossed over from stand-up to the screen.

  At The New Yorker, another important review medium, the film department had been shared since 1967 by Pauline Kael and Penelope Gilliatt, whose styles could not have been more dissimilar. As the most influential critic of the seventies, Kael redefined film criticism, and critics who followed her thinking would be dubbed "Paulettes." More often than not, her brass-knuckle reviews sounded angry, as if she felt personally offended by a film that did not meet her standards. She wrote as if she were being chased by a posse, which may have been what prompted Warren Beatty to nickname her Ma Barker, after the bank-robbing public enemy. Born in Petaluma, California, she was a tiny, argumentative woman, nondescript in appearance, three times married, who once had been fired by McCall's for knifing The Sound of Music. When she arrived at The New Yorker, she was almost fifty.

  Over the years, Kael would be tight with a number of directors who asked her opinion on scripts, invited her to their sets, and arranged special screenings. If electrified by a picture, she became its personal advocate and went on television to drum up enthusiasm. Crossing the line between criticism and film production, she resigned from The New Yorker in 1978 and took a Hollywood job developing film projects for Warren Beatty. (She soon returned to The New Yorker, however.)

  Among the new-wave directors, Kael's darlings were Arthur Penn, whose Bonnie and Clyde she single-handedly rescued from a premature demise, and Robert Altman, whose Nashville she had championed as virtually a perfect film. While Woody was not one of her pets, she did appreciate his work, to a point, because she thought his movies made people feel less insecure about their imperfections. In her eyes, Take the Money and Run had been nice but nothing special, "a limply good-natured little nothing of a comedy, soft as sneakers." For several years they maintained cordial relations, sometimes appearing together to collegially trade repartee on TV talk shows, but friendship counted for nothing to Kael at her typewriter. After giving Sleeper a couple of preliminary swings—"a beautiful little piece of work," "a small classic"—she administered an unexpected jab: If Sleeper was the best slapstick comedy of the year, it was only because "there hasn't been any other." Then she moved in for the knockout. Woody's films lacked an antic quality, in fact his humor reminded her of "strip-mining" because he scratched the surface without ever getting close to the mother lode. Psychologizing, she mocked him as hopelessly anal and reserved special scorn for his choice of the clarinet, "an instrument that appeals to controlled, precise people."

  The intensity of Kael's attack embarrassed Roger Angell, who urged Woody to ignore her and reminded him of a forthcoming profile by Penelope Gilliatt. By contrast, Gilliatt's film critiques tended to be literary, kindhearted, sometimes loopy. She admired Woody, recalled her close friend Andrew Sarris, "beyond belief." A vivacious, red-haired British writer who had once been married to the playwright John Osborne, she had visited Woody the previous summer in Culver City. A boozy dinner at Trader Vic's resulted in whispered confidences over rum punches (virgin punches for himself) and Chinese spareribs. Even then, at the age of forty-two, Gilliatt was known to have a weakness for alcohol, which would eventually contribute to her undoing. Sipping rum punches, she rapidly formed an extravagant opinion of her subject. In New York that fall, Woody invite
d her to his apartment for more cozy talks. Plying her with chocolate pudding, he confided choice secret tidbits about his first marriage, his analyst, his pigeon problem, the maid he was planning to fire, and his lifelong addiction to Hershey bars.

  In writing her New Yorker profile, Gilliatt got so carried away by Woody's puppyish vulnerability that she apparently began to think of him as a pet dog, a cuddly pooch with long red hair hanging around his neck "like a setter’s ears." He had "no idea of how nice he looks," she added. The New Yorker published the rum-punch piece with a straight face, though some of the writers there found it as nutty as a cuckoo clock. Ved Mehta would later describe this incident as one of those occasions when Gilliatt's work exhibited "a touch of the surreal." Afterward, Gilliatt invited Woody to her daughter Nolan's birthday party, and he deigned to accept. Another guest, Vincent Canby, recalled that "two dreadful little boys rushed over and one of them asked him to autograph a dollar bill. Woody obliged, and the other kid chimed in, 'Now it's worth two dollars!' and ran off. It was embarrassing but Woody was most gallant about it."